MAN WITH A MISSION
Decide where you stand. That’s the message the newly appointed SA Revenue Service (Sars) commissioner, Edward Kieswetter, has for his colleagues at the tax agency.
Kieswetter takes the reins at the embattled revenue service — one of the many institutions hollowed out by state capture — next month.
The new Sars boss is not unfamiliar with the effects of state capture — or with what needs to be done to clear out the rot. For the past year, he has served on the board of Transnet, one of the stateowned enterprises weakened by rampant corruption and mismanagement over the past decade.
The new Transnet board, under Popo Molefe, hit the ground running when it was appointed a year ago, wasting no time in removing those allegedly considered
complicit in state capture — including group CEO Siyabonga Gama — and recovering money allegedly looted through procurement contracts.
So what did Kieswetter learn from his time in the Transnet trenches?
“There are many who, through their silence or through their incompetence, stood by and allowed [state capture] to happen,” he tells the FM. “But there are many who were actively part of the sophisticated engineering of state capture — [creating] a false sense of demand in certain areas, or [inflating] that demand to blow up a grand procurement plan worth hundreds of millions or billions of rands, and then … siphon[ing] off some of that value.”
The problem, he says, is that “there are still those among us who are in denial about state capture”.
The message he delivered to his colleagues at Transnet, he says — the same one he will deliver at Sars — is that he can draw only one of two conclusions about those who deny the “real and devastating” statecapture project: “You are either ignorant or incompetent, or you are complicit. You must decide where you stand.”
It’s a pertinent message. Last year, judge Robert Nugent headed a commission of inquiry into governance failures at Sars. These were partly credited with revenue shortfalls that resulted in a VAT increase in 2018 — the first such increase in more than two decades — which hurt the poor.
On Nugent’s recommendation, disgraced Sars boss Tom Moyane was fired in November. Nugent found that Moyane lacked integrity and had colluded with consultants Bain & Co to implement a restructuring of Sars that severely weakened the agency.
So Moyane has gone, but there are concerns that little has yet been done to weed out those aligned to him.
For Kieswetter, the matter is simple: if you’re not on the side of SA’S young democracy — of healing and deepening that democracy — then “you are part of the problem”.
He says the Nugent commission flagged certain individuals in the breakdown of Sars,